The racing genre has received a nitrous-injection in the last few years thanks to the new love of car modding and illegal street racing, popularised by films like The Fast & The Furious and TV shows like Pimp My Ride. Now, in their never-ending quest for new franchises and world domination, EA Games has orchestrated a head-on collision between two of their most popular Need For Speed series: favourite newcomer 'Underground' and old veteran 'Hot Pursuit.' The result? Need For Speed: Most Wanted, a criminally good fun racer that appeals to the casual driver, for better or worse'

Need For Speed: Most Wanted tells the tale of a nameless street-racer (that's you by the way) who cruises into the city of Rockport thinking they'll own the place. But after a few races with the big boys, you lose your sweet ride under suspicious circumstances to the #1 racer in town, a hilariously overwrought villain named Razor. In a clever touch, this introductory sequence actually lets you control your car, even though the outcome is a foregone conclusion.

Thus, with only $30k to your name and with perambulation your only source of locomotion, you'll have to buy a new car and work your way up the ranks of the notorious Blacklist, taking names and pink-slips on your path of vengeance, until you finally reach Razor- and your original wheels- and become numero uno. It's a street-race soap-opera with bad acting to boot, but its damn good fun.

Career Mode in Most Wanted consists of the aforementioned revenge narrative, whereby you must slowly work your way up from a nobody with a stock car and less money than the public school system to the #1 slot. Before you can even dream about challenging a Blacklister, you'll need to beat a number of race events and achieve a few bounty milestones. The races are fairly straightforward, even though there are a variety of events. Sprint and Tollbooth is all about getting from A to B, while circuit and elimination see you completing a number of laps to win.

In a Drag race you need to move as fast as possible, and the speeds are so crazy that you won't have full control of your vehicle. It's more like a pattern-recognition game than anything else: learn which lanes have obstacles and avoid them! Lastly, there's the Speedtrap mode, a novel twist on your standard race where your performance is measured by how insanely fast you can drive through a number of fixed radars. Crossing the line first means nothing if your total speed isn't the highest.

Nabbing first place is essential in recording a win and ticking off another goal on your way to a Blacklist challenge, and this ensures you have a healthy amount of cash at your disposal for car tuning or buying new vehicles. All the races are worth the same amount of dosh (with the exception of Drag events, which net you much less), and the pot increases the higher you ascend the Blacklist. Of course to do that you not only have to win those races, but engage in reckless criminal carnage to enhance your reputation on the street.

The pursuit milestones give you an easy way of doing this by providing specific targets for any given pursuit. These may include trading paint with X number of cop cars, doing a certain amount of damage to public property, increasing your character's bounty, dodging roadblocks or evading capture within a specific timeframe. Of course you can just do it the hard way and accrue bounty in tiny trickles during short, low-level pursuits, but where's the fun in that?!

The longer (and more often) you're in pursuit mode, the more challenging it will get thanks to the wanted-level system in the game. As you do more and more naughty things in any of your cars, that vehicle's 'heat' level goes up, representing an increased attention from the local constabulary. At first you'll just be dealing with the local bumpkins, but eventually you'll have state police and feds on your tail, employing more sophisticated techniques and aggressive tactics to take you down. This includes ramming your car, boxing you in, setting up roadblocks, deploying spike-traps, and calling in air support to get a bird's eye view and co-ordinate the effort to stop you in your tracks.

Pursuit mode can be a helluva lot of fun, but it can also be quite frustrating. By the time you hit the top 5 on the Blacklist, reaching your pursuit milestones can require up to half an hour playtime in a single pursuit, and if you get busted, you'll have to go again and your vehicle gets a black mark next to its name, as well as some hefty fines to be paid. Too many impound strikes and your pride'n'joy will be seized by the fuzz, no doubt sold at auction to buy more donuts. So there's some extremely tense moments to be had, filled with near-misses, close-calls and skin-of-the-teeth escapes.

But getting caught really does suck, and you'll probably want to just reset your Xbox quickly before you have to deal with the consequences. Luckily you'll have plenty of 'pursuit breakers' along the way, which are essentially just environmental hazards you can employ to disable your pursuers, or force them to stop and clean up your mess. These range from smashing through billboards to plowing into service stations and causing the bowsers to blow up. If you manage to shake the man, there's also a plethora of hiding places that allow you to go to ground and end the pursuit quickly, and using these is vital to surviving your brushes with the law.

On the topic of getting caught, it's worth mentioning that Most Wanted suffers from some pretty horrid rubber-band A.I. during the singleplayer mode'it's almost unavoidable in racing games really, but that doesn't make it any more pleasant. It becomes more of an issue once you crack the top 6 or 7 spots on the Blacklist, as the races and events tend to get much longer; after 15 kilometres of racing, being pipped at the post by catch-up drivers may cause you to get in your own car and reverse over the disc a few times.

Despite NFS: Most Wanted essentially being a new franchise for EA, comparisons to Need For Speed: Underground 2 are unavoidable. Most wanted takes a few steps forward and a few back compared to the Underground series: you no longer have to search the streets for races or events- you can hop straight to your destination via a menu- which will save you a lot of aimless cruising. But on the flipside, there's much less room for customising and personalisation of your ride, with fewer accessories and options for modding. Compared to the likes of Forza Motorsports it's offensively simplistic, hell, you can only have one measly layer of decals compared to Forza's 200ish! But if you're the kind of person who really doesn't care about the angle of your spoiler or calibrating the pressure of your rear-left tyre to a fraction of a PSI, you'll never notice. Likewise, tuning is entirely limited to a black & white trade-off in any given field, for example you can have a longer but less powerful nitro boost, or a shorter but much stronger boost. Put simply, it's EA at their finest: everything is streamlined to make the game accessible to the largest- one might use the word mainstream in the pejorative here- audience possible.

On the topic of nitrous and boosts and so-forth, Most Wanted has a pretty disappointing sensation of speed. The effects really don't convey the reality of driving at 300km/h or more, and almost appear cartoonish in places. It never feels truly dangerous or thrilling either, but then, not much can top Burnout 3 when it comes to pure, unadulterated speed and messy repercussions. Damage modeling plays a large part in this, and while your ride in Most Wanted will suffer minor cosmetic issues from hitting a concrete barricade at 250km/h, there's no other consequences other than having to speed up again.

The cars all look great though, and in pursuit mode the police vehicles will get absolutely trashed which is quite satisfying. The city of Rockport and its surrounds look fantastic, and even during free-roaming or pursuit as you hurtle from one end to the other at breakneck pace, the framerate only rarely skips a beat, and you will never encounter a loading screen once you're in the game. There's some cool effects in the game too, like being momentarily blinded by the light as you emerge from tunnels.

The audio in Most Wanted is mostly good: all the voice actors do a pretty decent job, and Josie Maran is much warmer and likeable as your foxy female friend than Underground 2's ice-queen Brook Burke. Police chatter is the real standout though: hearing the dispatcher update units to your exact location and movements is very, very cool! Car effects are, well, car effects, but each vehicle sounds unique. The music is pretty disappointing- a generic assortment of rap crap and try-hardcore rock never really inspires, it just irritates. More annoying is EA's stubborn refusal to jump on board with the Xbox platform's custom soundtrack abilities. Having to endure the woeful soundtrack repeating frequently is bad enough, but knowing how easy it would be to do a custom soundtrack rubs salt into the road-rash.

Multiplayer is a bit of a mixed bag in Most Wanted too, especially online. Clearly it was tacked on as an afterthought to make the game more 'feature-rich' or 'value-added' or whatever synergistic corporate speak EA uses these days. To their credit though, it's quite stable and connecting to EA's servers is far less painful than it was in Burnout 3. You'll wish you hadn't bothered though, as you're greeted by a lacklustre series of 4-player options ranging from sprit, circuit and drag. You can't even whack a few A.I. controlled pimpmobiles in to make things more interesting.

The real travesty though is the lack of Pursuit mode online- easily the highlight of singleplayer; it defies logic that they didn't think to incorporate this into the multiplayer environment. Offline doesn't fare much better, being only 2 players in splitscreen, and even then the game takes a massive visual and performance hit. Overall, multiplayer can be a bit of diversionary fun before you move on to bigger or better things, but don't buy the game for it.